BrowserStack using Zendesk solution successfully reduced the first response time (FRT) for client tech support from a few hours to less than 30 minutes and improved its customer satisfaction rating (CSAT) scorePankaj Maru | ETCIO | Updated: June 02, 2017, 12:19 IST

Prasun Choudhury, BrowserStack’s Head - Customer Support.Bangalore: BrowserStack is a cloud based web-testing tool for software development. The tool allows developers to test their websites on more than 1,100 desktop and mobile browsers.

Founded in 2011, the Mumbai headquartered company with its offices in San Francisco and Dublin has been running its operations with a lean 11 agent team, which provides business and technical support to 36,000 customers that use BrowserStack’s Live and Automate products globally.

Despite the expanding customer base, company has managed to keep its operations and support team small over the years using customer service tools.

Although Browser was using Desk.com – an online customer service and support ticketing tool, it wanted a better and efficient software that would improve its agents’ responsiveness, reduce the time to service and overall enhance the customer experience as well.

“Our key challenge was to scale up our support side to meet requirements of our enterprise grade customers with customizable reporting,” said Prasun Choudhury, BrowserStack’s Head of Customer Support.

Given this challenge, Choudhury created a spreadsheet with some 37 parameters to test and evaluate customer relationship management (CRM) tools available in the market from different vendors including Salesforce, Freshdesk, Zendesk along with the existing Desk.com.

Multi-channel customer support, easy integration with social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, usability, productivity, reporting and others were among the 37 parameters, Choudhary had listed for testing and selection purpose of those CRM tools from different vendors.

“We really wanted a multi-channel system and easy integration with Twitter and Facebook. We also wanted to set up SLAs for each ticket, based on the priority and customer segment,” informed Choudhary.

After testing those CRM tools for a month’s duration, Choudhury was ready with his decision on picking the vendor.

“Zendesk was the hands-down winner for us as it could take on all of the checkpoints on our sheet. It gave us a way to do all of that and when we compared the ease of working with the tool, and productivity, Zendesk scored far higher than Desk.com,” said Choudhury.

Further, “Another area where Zendesk came up top was in reporting,” added Choudhury.

Post the testing and selection phase, Choudhury had successfully deployed Zendesk’s CRM tool in the organisation within a week’s time.

According to Choudhury, Zendesk’s CRM tool is a good tool not just for the support agents but also for the customers from reporting perspective. The deployment was done mid-last year and since then, BrowserStack has been reaping its benefits.

BrowserStack’s agents were not only able to provide email and social media based support but using Zendesk Talk, they were easily able to connect the customers for billing purpose and create tickets within the same system.

Overall, this has led to a positive impact on the customer engagement and service responsiveness of BrowserStack. “Our responsiveness to customers has improved tremendously. Due to Zendesk’s reporting capabilities, our first response time (FRT) for tech support has reduced to an average time of 26 minutes from few hours,” informed Choudhury.

And in case of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, BrowserStack’s FRT has been 5 to 10 minutes, which according to Choudhury is because of the improved relationship between customers and his support staff.

Company has more than 36,000 customers spread across North America, US and Asia Pacific region. The solution deployment has helped the company to improve their per agent utilization average as well.

BrowserStack claimed that its efficiency and performance has improved and it has translated to an average CSAT score of 98 percent. In addition, it has also set up an internal knowledge base in Zendesk Support and is in the process of launching a help centre enabling customers with self-services.